MAGI MERLIN FEATURED AS SPOTIFY’S RADAR ARTIST OF THE MONTH

RADAR CANADA SPOTIFY PLAYLIST
RADAR GLOBAL SPOTIFY PLAYLIST

BUY / STREAM POWER HOUSE HERE

POWER HOUSE VINYL ON SALE TODAY // LAVENDER EDITION & GREEN EDITION

“Magi Merlin Is All Things All the Time on 'POWER HOUSE'" Exclaim!

Welcome to Magi Merlin’s House” RANGE

“So Smart is a sweet love letter to oneself; a reminder to be kind and gentle. ...ethereal yet empowered." CBC Music ‘Songs You Need To Hear’

“‘So Smart’ maps out a constellation of radical empathy in a world that practices individualism and narcissism.” Clash Magazine

Photo Credit: Sophia Perras // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

Spotify Canada has announced that Magi Merlin is the RADAR artist for the months of August and September, featuring on the cover of both the RADAR Canada and RADAR Global playlists as well as accompanying billboards in Toronto and New York. This announcement comes shortly after the release of POWER HOUSE, the debut album by the Montreal-based avant-garde pop and “broken R&B” artist. Her new effort has already racked up more than 1.6 million streams on Spotify alone.

RADAR CANADA SPOTIFY PLAYLIST
RADAR GLOBAL SPOTIFY PLAYLIST

Spotify’s RADAR program is grounded in supporting emerging artists from across the globe. While the program is global, each region has also tailored a local offering to resonate with their unique music culture and audience. Each market will support local artists based on their needs and expertise, all under Spotify’s emerging artist umbrella: RADAR.

With the release of POWER HOUSE and the singles that preceded it, Magi Merlin garnered praise from BBC Radio 6 Music, BBC Radio 1, Clash, Stereogum, Brooklyn Vegan, KCRW, KEXP, Wonderland, Glamcult (of which she was the cover star in June), Libération, France Inter, Radio France, CBC, Radio-Canada, Le Devoir, Exclaim!, and many others. The album has spent the last number of weeks in earshot! Top 10, and album single “Whip” has been climbing up the CBC Music Top 20.

Released digitally on all music services on July 10 via Bonsound, POWER HOUSE is available on vinyl starting today, August 28th. Limited editions can be purchased on Bonsound’s web store (Lavender Edition) and via Bandcamp (Green Edition).

After a memorable show at the legendary Rock en Seine festival in Paris earlier this week, Magi Merlin will perform at Les Foufounes Électriques in Montreal on September 17 and at the Adelaide Hall in Toronto on October 14. Headline shows are also planned in London, New York and Chicago later this fall. Check out the list below for all tour dates.

WATCH / SHARE “pixxxie” HERE

LISTEN TO MAGI MERLIN TALK ABOUT “POPSTAR” AND POWER HOUSE ON CBC Q WITH TOM POWER

MORE ABOUT POWER HOUSE
Written from her bisexual/ENM perspective and her broader experience of existing as a woman in systems designed to flatten her, the album navigates the contradictions of seeking validation in both platonic and romantic contexts, deconstructing the "plastic confidence" we're taught to wear. Merlin operates as co-producer and creative director, ensuring the visual world mirrors the music's refusal to soften. It's designed as a ‘living universe’ where every element, from sound to image to performance, is intentional and self-defined. This is her philosophy: real change starts small but sounds immense.

Throughout POWER HOUSE, Magi refuses to be flattened. She buries self-kindness under distorted synth. She won't resolve tension into a chorus. The armour she wears is declaration, not defence. Her music splinters—jungle breaks bleeding into futuristic synths, '90s house fractured by raw vocals. Her visual world is industrial, deliberate, refusing the consistency that makes things recognizable. She operates entirely outside of categories, including the alternative ones. POWER HOUSE is what it sounds like when someone refuses every uniform.

WATCH / SHARE “SPICEKICK” HERE

BUY / STREAM POWER HOUSE HERE

MORE ABOUT MAGI MERLIN
There's a special kind of kindred spirit that Magi Merlin makes music for; her fellow obsessives. Magi (pronounced Mahd-j-eye) sings directly to the listener, face pressed up against the other side of the screen's glass. Through her propulsive, avant-garde form of pop and "Broken” R&B, she explores life's deep existential truths, tearing through imagination and genre like outfits ripped off a garment rack. Whether that be a Galliano tulle skirt for a quick studio session, lace wrist cuffs on a first date, or jungle-inspired splintered kick drums giving way to futuristic synth lines.

Over the last years, she has written and co-composed largely alongside Funkywhat, a collaborator with whom she has built a shared musical language. Magi’s alternative forms of pop and R&B are about as high-definition as one can imagine, without sacrificing sensuousness and emotion. Her 2022 EP Gone Girl is music that feels alive, animated by a voice that blends unruly maximalism and earned wisdom. It sent her on tour with Noga Erez and on an electric performance in Mexico City in support of Omar Apollo. A surprise EP in 2025, A Weird Little Dog, brought a deepened emphasis to her experimental style and gave rise to “Broken R&B”, a genre she named and owns entirely, less a marketing category than an honest account of how she works, her art direction and visual world as idiosyncratic and charged as the music itself. Soon after, she opened for Nubya Garcia across the US, with festival appearances at Osheaga, Festival d'été de Québec, where she opened for Ty Dolla $ign, and most recently a European support run with Yaya Bey. Outside of music, she made her acting debut in 2026 with Chandler Levack's Mile End Kicks, alongside Barbie Ferreira, Devon Bostick, and Juliette Gariépy, which screened at TIFF and SXSW.

TOUR DATES
12/09/2026 - Elizabethtown, NY - Otis Mountain Get Down
17/09/2026 - Montréal, QC - Foufounes Électriques
14/10/2026 - Toronto, ON - Adelaide Hall
22/10/2026 - La Rochelle, FR - SWIM Festival
28/10/2026 - London, UK - Colours Hoxton
31/10/2026 - Brussels, BE - Le Botanique (Les Nuits Weekender)
04/11/2026 - Brooklyn, NY - Elsewhere Zone 1
19/11/2026 - Chicago, IL - Sleeping Village

MAGI MERLIN ONLINE
YOUTUBE
INSTAGRAM
TIKTOK

TRUE MOUNTAIN LAUREL’S DEBUT LP OUT TODAY, SHARE NEW VIDEO

TRUE MOUNTAIN LAUREL, THE ‘SUPERGROUP’ OF HALEY BLAIS AND SAM LYNCH, DEBUT ALBUM, ANGEL SO BAD, OUT TODAY VIA BIRTHDAY CAKE RECORDS

WATCH / SHARE “EAST OF ANYTHING” HERE

TOUR DATES CONTINUE SEPTEMBER 15 | FULL DATES LISTED BELOW
TICKETS ON SALE HERE

BUY / STREAM ANGEL SO BAD HERE

LISTEN TO TRUE MOUNTAIN LAUREL’S INTERVIEW
WITH TOM POWER ON CBC Q HERE

“True Mountain Laurel make a strong case that we just need to get our friends together and do some vivacious yapping, set it to a dusty, forlornly hopeful folk tune and rise, together.” - Exclaim!

“For Blais and Lynch, playfulness isn’t an escape from sincerity but another way of accessing it, allowing the record to have fun while still engaging thoughtfully with the traditions of folk music…Rather than pulling from the wells of brutal emotionality that typically inform their solo projects, the friends leaned into folk traditions of fiction and storytelling, returning to the music they listened to as kids.” - RANGE

“Both Vancouver musicians are experts in smart indie rock that sounds extremely sweet while the lyrics cut deep. That’s true in their partnership, True Mountain Laurel, as well.”
- The Georgia Straight

Photo Credit : Mikaela Kautzky // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

Born out of late-night harmonies, shared voice memos, and a long-standing friendship rooted in mutual admiration, Haley Blais and Sam Lynch formed the supergroup True Mountain Laurel. Today, they release their debut record, Angel So Bad. A tender, dust-swept exploration of all the feelings that fall through the cracks, the record is equal parts folk reverie and country yearning, while the project pulls from their respective solo careers. Sam’s poetic introspection and Haley’s razor-sharp lyrical intimacy blend into something softer, stranger, and wholly their own.

Accompanying the album today is the new video for “East of Anything”, a song that was written as an act of persistence in the face of creative exhaustion and lives in a midnight room where memory, loneliness, drunkenness, and comfort all start to bleed into one another. The song is a steady flame in the face of emotional dislocation; something to focus your eyes on when you’re feeling slightly outside of reality, outside of clarity, outside of where you thought you were meant to be; east of anything. 

“East Of Anything” was “our first whack at co-writing together,” explains Haley and Sam. “This song sat in such a magical middle place between each of our songwriting and musical tendencies. We silently danced around the subject of who would ‘get the song’ for a little while before we realized it belonged exactly where it was; that was the inception of True Mountain Laurel.”

WATCH / SHARE “EAST OF ANYTHING” HERE

MORE ABOUT ANGEL SO BAD + TRUE MOUNTAIN LAUREL
What began as casual writing sessions in between Sam and Haley’s respective tour cycles has slowly transformed into a collaborative ritual: trading lines and melodies over coffee and recording scrappy voice note demos at the end of the day. The songs emerged not from pressure or plan but from a desire to make music the way they first fell in love with it — no clocks, no ego, just two voices in a room.

WATCH / SHARE “ANGEL SO BAD” HERE

Influenced by artists like Gillian Welch, Lucinda Williams, and early 2000s Canadian singer-songwriters, the project is less about genre and more about feel. Acoustic guitars, brushed drums, pedal steel, and the occasional jangly piano support lyrics that feel diaristic without being confessional: capturing the ache of growing older, the strangeness of still wanting more, and the joy of finding home in another person’s voice.

There’s a looseness to these songs that feels intentional. Where Sam’s solo work leans cinematic and atmospheric, and Haley’s leans into the clever and orchestral, here they meet in the middle: warm, minimal, and a little bit rough around the edges. Live, the project takes on an even more intimate form without setlists or rigid arrangements. Just two friends singing the truth as they feel it that night.

LISTEN / SHARE “HOLY HELL” HERE
WATCH / SHARE “HOLY HELL” LIVE PERFORMANCE VIDEO HERE

LISTEN TO TRUE MOUNTAIN LAUREL’S INTERVIEW
WITH TOM POWER ON CBC Q HERE

TRUE MOUNTAIN LAUREL TOUR DATES
9/15/2026 Emmanuel United Church, Waterloo, ON
9/16/2026 Mills Hardware, Hamilton, ON
9/17/2026 Harmony Hall, Gormley, ON
9/19/2026 4th Stage NAC, Ottawa, ON
9/20/2026 Knox Hall, Sudbury, ON
9/22/2026 Hugh's Room, Toronto, ON
9/24/2026 Pop Montreal - Le Ministere, Montreal, QC
9/28/2026 The Carleton, Halifax, NS
9/29/2026 Trailside, Charlottetown, PEI
9/30/2026 The Cap, Fredericton, NB
10/2/2026 Frolic and Folk Pub, Iona, NS
11/3/2026 Modern Love, Calgary, AB
11/4/2026 The Artesian, Regina, SK
11/5/2026 Side Stage, Winnipeg, MB
11/6/2026 Amigos, Saskatoon, SK
11/7/2026 Double Dragon, Edmonton, AB
11/8/2026 Communitea Café, Canmore, BC
11/10/2026 The Old Fire Hall Tavern, Rossland, BC
11/11/2026 The Hub on Martin, Penticton, BC
11/12/2026 Mel Lehan Hall at St. James Square, Vancouver, BC

BUY / STREAM ANGEL SO BAD HERE

DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

ANGEL SO BAD TRACKLIST
01 Angel So Bad
02 Holy Hell
03 Bird Of Prey
04 East Of Anything
05 Sunny
06 I Love You, Nicole
07 Angel Reprise
08 The Trial

TRUE MOUNTAIN LAUREL ONLINE
INSTAGRAM
TIKTOK
YOUTUBE
BANDCAMP

SUMMERSETS NEW ALBUM OUT TODAY, SHARE NEW VIDEO

SUMMERSETS NEW ALBUM, PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW, OUT TODAY

WATCH / SHARE “PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW” HERE

NOMINATED FOR AN ONTARIO FOLK MUSIC AWARD,
RECORDING ARTIST OF THE YEAR

FALL TOUR DATES BEGIN THIS OCTOBER

BUY / STREAM PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW HERE
PURCHASE PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW VINYL HERE

“Pine Trees In A Perfect Row” Video Still

Today, summersets, the duo of Kalle Mattson and Andrew Sowka, release their new album, Pine Trees in a Perfect Row, an album that was written “to be a (complicated) love letter to Northern Ontario and small town Canadian identity and experience,” explains Mattson. “It's a collection of songs about real Canadian stories, and a character study of a landscape and place that is rarely written about in popular music.” 

Each song on Pine Trees in a Perfect Row is based on versions of real people and stories, a collage of characters from my life from Northern Ontario, serving as a sonic autoethnography intersecting memory, class, and place. “While the album is rooted in the idea of the Canadian small town, it’s not just a 'Canada' record; it's a look at Canadian identity on a personal and specific scale, with the intention of speaking to a (hopefully) universal sentiment: that you never really leave your home,” says Mattson.

The album arrives with a video for the title track, “Pine Trees In A Perfect Row”, of which Mattson says: "Portrayals of small town Canada in modern popular music are extremely few and far between, especially compared to our American counterparts who have made entire genres and industries out of mythologizing the American small town. With this album (and song) I wanted to write openly and specifically about who I am and where I’m from, and to actually have all these hyper-local locations, cultural signifiers, common phrases explicitly mentioned and recorded, as this has seldom been done previously. ‘Pine Trees…’ really caps off the album with the narrator driving back through Northern Ontario sort of resigned to the fact that we never really leave our hometown."

WATCH / SHARE “PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW” HERE

MORE ABOUT PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW
By Michael Barclay

Like many of their financially pinched generation, Kalle Mattson and Andrew Sowka of summersets might have to “Move Back Home”. That song, from the harmony-rich Ottawa duo’s second album, Pine Trees In A Perfect Row, is of the timeliest singles of 2026, by acknowledging the affordability crisis in North American cities. As any headline will tell you — but not many songs will — millennials are reckoning with the fact that they’ll be unlikely to afford a home in major urban centres, and are moving back to the small towns they were eager to escape in their youth. (In the case of summersets, that’s the Great Lakes city of Sault Ste. Marie, in Northern Ontario.)

“Move Back Home” was the first song Mattson wrote for Pine Trees, and it gave him a theme to centre the rest around. “So many people I went to high school with moved away from Sault Ste. Marie or somewhere else in northern Ontario, and then in order to move ahead in life they had to move back home: retreat to move forward.” There’s an explicit theme of class consciousness and economic realism absent in so much popular music, even though the times clearly call for it: witness the recent revival of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” as a rare example.

WATCH / SHARE “MOVE BACK HOME” HERE
WATCH / SHARE “LOVE LIKE YOU” HERE

But there’s another timely element of home that runs throughout Pine Trees in a Perfect Row, one that speaks to Mattson’s identity as a Canadian songwriter at a time of considerable North American tension.  That said, the first track is simply titled “Canada”. Says Mattson, “The chorus was just a placeholder, but every three-syllable word I tried never felt right. So let’s own it! There are so few modern songs about Canada. And not in a waving-the-flag way: I’m as conflicted as anyone about where I'm from and how it’s shaped my life and my writing.” The album’s striking artwork is influenced by the Canadian modernist movement of the 1960s, which culminated with Expo 67. 

As a solo artist in the 2010s, Mattson won or was nominated for every major prize in Canada, for his three consecutive albums 2014’s Someday, The Moon Will Be Gold, 2015’s Avalanche and 2018’s Youth.. During pandemic lockdowns in 2020, he formed summersets with Sowka, his childhood friend, to explore Everly Brother harmonies and to alleviate the weight of being a solo artist. Their acclaimed 2023 debut Small Town Story was a narrative concept album, exploring the lives of one couple whose story ends in tragedy.

WATCH / SHARE “MILLION DOLLAR TICKET” HERE
WATCH / SHARE “CANADA” HERE

This time out, Mattson says he didn’t want to write fiction. On Pine Trees, the stories and characters are very real: one song, “Another Year For Free”, has one verse about high school, one about a divorcée, one about his Italian immigrant grandfather who worked at a steel plant, and one about his mother’s cancer. He admits the vignette structure is based in part on Paul Simon’s “Slip Sliding Away”, a song he’s taught in class as a songwriting professor at a Canadian university. 

“Secondhand Skates” tells the story of a childhood friend and hockey teammate who was killed by an allegedly drunk driver at 19, while walking his girlfriend home the night before Canada won Olympic gold in 2010. “All the details in that song are true,” says Mattson. “The driver didn’t brake. There was a cross on the side of the road made out of hockey sticks, and that image always stuck with me. It was really hard to write and not make it feel too on the nose. It was the last song I wrote for the record.” 

WATCH / SHARE “IF YOU WERE A STRANGER” HERE

The sweet sounds of summersets often mask melancholy and darkness, but there’s one song on Pine Trees that Mattson considers to be “the only true love song I’ve ever written.” ‘If you were a stranger / I would fall in love again / If you were the start / I would stay right until the end.” He explains, “My partner and I grew up together, and have been together most of our adult lives. We have complicated family situations: we both lost our mothers young, don’t have a lot of family — we’re all we got. I wanted to write something that felt like us.”

Pine Trees is a stripped-down acoustic record that sounds like what it is: recorded live off the floor with keyboardist/producer Jim Bryson (Kathleen Edwards, Weakerthans) and Peter Von Althen (Skydiggers) on drums. Only additional guitarist Christine Bougie (Bahamas) and a string section were overdubbed later. That immediacy and intimacy comes through in every note. 

Says Mattson, proudly, “It feels really like I've finally made the record I've wanted to make for a long time.”

BUY / STREAM PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW HERE
PURCHASE PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW VINYL HERE

PERFORMANCE DATES
Oct 10 - Ottawa, ON - NAC
Oct 23 - Toronto, ON - Burdock Music Hall
Oct 24 - Sault Ste. Marie, ON - The Loft

DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW TRACKLIST
01 Canada
02 Move Back Home
03 Forgetting For The Better
04 If You Were A Stranger
05 Another Year For Free
06 Second Hand Skates
07 Love Like You
08 Million Dollar Ticket
09 Words Worth Writing
10 Somewhere Gone
11 Pine Trees In A Perfect Row

SUMMERSETS ONLINE
BANDCAMP
INSTAGRAM
FACEBOOK
YOUTUBE